273 articles
Gender-critical feminism
Gender-critical feminism, also called anti-trans feminism or TERFism, holds that womanhood is defined by immutable biological sex and opposes trans inclusion; roots in 1970s radical feminism, catalyzed by the 2018 UK GRA reform debate, and validated by the 2025 UK Supreme Court ruling.
Gender-neutral language
Gender-neutral language avoids specifying or presuming gender, replacing generic masculine forms like 'he' and 'man'. Singular 'they' dates to circa 1350; over 200 invented pronouns exist; Merriam-Webster recognized nonbinary 'they' in 2019.
Gentleman
Gentleman: originally an Englishman of gentle birth below the titled aristocracy, later a moral standard of courteous male conduct defined by manners rather than birth, now a contested gendered address term.
Germaine Greer
Germaine Greer (born 1939) is an Australian feminist writer and academic, author of the 1970 bestseller The Female Eunuch, known for her celebrity feminism, later works like The Whole Woman, and controversy over her statements that transgender women are not women.
Girl
Girl: a female child; girlhood is the associated cultural category. Key facts: girlhood studies, an interdisciplinary feminist field, emerged from the late 1980s and 1990s, studies intersectional girlhoods, and documents barriers such as child marriage and educational exclusion.
Girlboss
Girlboss: slang for an ambitious, entrepreneurial woman, popularized by Sophia Amoruso's 2014 book #Girlboss after earlier American newspaper uses from 1895; celebrated as empowerment feminism in the mid-2010s, then turned ironic after Nasty Gal's 2016 bankruptcy and the 2021 Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss meme.
Gisèle Pelicot
Gisèle Pelicot, French victim of the Mazan rape trial; drugged by ex-husband Dominique Pelicot and raped by dozens of men 2011–2020; opened her 2024 Avignon trial to the public, saying "shame must change sides"; 51 convictions, 20-year maximum sentence.
Glass ceiling
Glass ceiling: metaphor for invisible barriers blocking women and minorities from top management, coined circa 1978-1986 in the US; related to glass cliff, sticky floor, labyrinth; tested empirically and addressed via board quotas.
Global Gender Gap Report
Annual World Economic Forum report since 2006 using the Global Gender Gap Index to rank economies on parity in economic participation, education, health, and political empowerment; 2025 score 68.8% closed, led by Iceland.
Gloria Steinem
Gloria Steinem (1934–2026), American journalist and feminist organizer, co-founded Ms. magazine, the National Women's Political Caucus, and the Women's Media Center; received the 2013 Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Glossary of BDSM
Glossary of BDSM: reference vocabulary of kink terminology, covering the acronym (bondage & discipline, dominance & submission, sadism & masochism), roles like dominant, submissive, and switch, and terms such as scene, safeword, SSC, RACK, aftercare, and munch.
Go Topless Day
Go Topless Day is an annual demonstration day, held since 2007 on the Saturday nearest August 26 (Women's Equality Day), organized by GoTopless to assert women's equal right to go topless in public; distinct from the trademarked May Jeep event of the same name.
Gynocentrism
Gynocentrism: a dominant or exclusive focus on women in theory or practice; counterpart to androcentrism. Used in feminist philosophy (gynocentric feminism, Iris Young) and men's rights discourse.
HeForShe
HeForShe is UN Women's solidarity movement for gender equality, launched 20 September 2014 by Ban Ki-moon and Emma Watson, engaging men and boys through pledges, the IMPACT 10x10x10 program, and the HeForShe Alliance.
Hegemonic masculinity
Hegemonic masculinity, coined by Carrigan, Connell and Lee in 1985 and reformulated by Connell and Messerschmidt in 2005, is the culturally idealized masculinity legitimizing men's dominance over women and some men over others, part of a hierarchy including complicit, subordinated, and marginalized masculinities.
Herbivore men
Herbivore men (草食系男子, sōshoku-kei danshi), also called sōshoku danshi, are Japanese men uninterested in pursuing romance, sex, and conventional career ambition. Coined by Maki Fukasawa and popularized in 2008–2009, the term contrasts with "carnivore" men and is linked to Japan's declining marriage and birth rates.
Hijab in Iran
Compulsory hijab in Iran: mandatory veiling since the 1979 revolution, reversed Reza Shah's 1936 unveiling, enforced by morality police, contested by 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom protests after Mahsa Amini's death.
Himbo
Himbo is slang for an attractive but unintelligent or vacuous man, a blend of "him" and "bimbo" first recorded in 1988 and often used affectionately.
History of feminism
History of feminism: organized movements for equality of the sexes, told as waves from 1848 Seneca Falls suffrage campaigning through 1960s women's liberation, 1990s third-wave intersectionality, and digital #MeToo fourth wave.
Housewife
Housewife: a married woman whose main occupation is unpaid household management and care; synonymous with homemaker. Defined by the 19th-century withdrawal-from-labor-market norm, the 708 million women excluded from labor forces by unpaid care work, and declining stay-at-home-parent shares.
Huda Sha'arawi (هدى شعراوي)
Huda Sha'arawi (هدى شعراوي, 1879–1947), born Nur al-Huda Sultan, Egyptian nationalist and feminist who founded the Egyptian Feminist Union in 1923, led the 1919 women's protest, and publicly unveiled at Cairo's train station in 1923.
Human male sexuality
Human male sexuality covers male sexual desire, arousal, erection, ejaculation, and orgasm, testosterone's central hormonal role, Kinsey's 1948 report and the Kinsey Scale, Masters and Johnson's 1966 physiology research, and how masculinity norms shape male sexual behavior and health.
Incel
Incel (involuntary celibate) is an online subculture of men who define themselves by perceived inability to form romantic relationships; coined by a woman in the 1990s, now part of the manosphere, marked by blackpill ideology, rare but high-profile violence, and widespread mental health struggles.
International Day of the Girl Child
International Day of the Girl Child is a UN observance on 11 October, created by Resolution 66/170 in 2011 and first held in 2012. Annual themes address girls' rights; the 2026 theme targets child marriage, which affects over 12 million girls yearly.
International Men's Day
International Men's Day, observed 19 November worldwide, founded 1999 by Jerome Teelucksingh in Trinidad and Tobago after Thomas Oaster's 1992 February version; Six Pillars, around 80 countries, not a UN observance.
International Women's Day
International Women's Day, marked 8 March, arose from early-1900s labor and socialist women's movements, was proposed by Clara Zetkin in 1910, first held 1911, and tied to the 1917 Russian women's demonstrations; UN-recognized since 1977.
Intersectionality
Intersectionality, coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, is an analytical framework from Black feminism examining how race, gender, class, and other social positions reciprocally construct inequality, now used across law, health research, and AI fairness.
Irreversible Damage
Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters is Abigail Shrier's 2020 Regnery book arguing adolescent girls' trans identification reflects social contagion via rapid-onset gender dysphoria; a bestseller praised by The Economist and criticized by transgender health clinicians.
Islamic feminism
Islamic feminism: feminist scholarship and activism grounding gender equality in the Qur'an and Islamic tradition; label current since the 1990s; key figures Wadud, Barlas, Mernissi, Hassan; distinct from Islamist feminism.
James A. Lindsay
James A. Lindsay, American mathematician (PhD, University of Tennessee, 2010), author, and founder of New Discourses, known for the 2018 Grievance Studies hoax with Pluckrose and Boghossian and for Cynical Theories and Race Marxism.